USA TODAY International Edition
Facebook apps reveal plenty of personal information
Turning them off can help protect your data
Ever downloaded an app through Facebook? Time to check your privacy settings.
Reports that the political research firm Cambridge Analytica obtained the personal data of 50 million-plus Facebook users through a personality quiz app should have anybody on the social network uneasy over the third parties they’ve let into their account.
Facebook allows apps to access much of users’ profile information but has tightened up some controls. For instance, it prevents apps from seeing the personal data of people in your friends’ list, the giant loophole the British researcher legitimately used to access data that the researcher allegedly then, against Facebook’s rules, sold to Cambridge Analytica — a misuse the social network knew about three years ago.
An app can ask for access to anything in your profile — and can declare some of that information “required” — and you have to decide if you trust it with that data and if you trust the developer to delete your information should you later remove the app.
Once you add an app to your Facebook profile or use your Facebook account to log into another site, it’s easy to forget the exposure you incurred and with whom you did business. Both things — the “what” of an app or site’s access to your data and the “who” of that outside company — matter. You can check both in a desktop browser or Facebook’s mobile apps.
In a browser, click or tap the downward-facing triangle at the top right, then select “Settings” then “Apps.” In Android, tap the three-line button at the top right, select “Account settings,” then “Apps.”
In iOS, that button is at bottom right, after which you tap “Settings,” “Account Settings” then “Apps.”
In either mobile app, tap a “Logged in with Facebook” banner. You’ll see a list of apps and sites, grouped by who on Facebook can see you use them — everyone, friends only, a custom setting or only you.
At a minimum, they all get what any stranger logged into Facebook would: “your name, profile picture, cover photo, gender, networks, username, and user ID.” Things after that depend on what the app asked and what you allowed.
❚ Login with Facebook? When you add an app or use Facebook to sign up at a different site, you should see a Facebook dialogue explaining your data exposure, some of which you can decline.
❚ What happened before the election? This entire system assumes an app developer will tell the truth, which did not happen in the Cambridge Analytica case. As Facebook explained in a Friday night post, the “this is your digital life” app created by University of Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan purported to be an academic research exercise. But Kogan then gave Cambridge the data coughed up by some 270,000 people in 2013.
An app can ask for access to anything in your profile — and can declare some of that information “required.”